Exciting announcement. Even if it has hinged blades its still going to be a big improvement over the HO sized streamline. I've fired off an email to peco though as its going to be pretty useless without matching points. Even just medium radius L & R would do. It would look really odd next to HO scale point work.

The amount of wholly irrelevant twaddle currently being discussed, yet again, by obsessive "we know everything about every kind of track" bores over on RMW, in a thread that is supposed to be purely about the forthcoming new Peco OO bullhead track, appears to have reached record levels....

If any of them have managed to stop being boring for long enough to produce offspring, I wonder if they have even taken the "father of the bride" speech at their daughter's wedding as an open invitation to drone on about technical details of full-size continuously welded flat-bottom rail, heavy concrete sleepers, deep ballasting and Hooke's Law?

Most subjects, models and techniques covered in this thread are now listed in various categories on page1

Dec. 2018: Almost all images that disappeared from my own thread following loss of free remote hosting are now restored.

Meanwhile those of us with a sporting instinct are interested to see if Peco will be stirred into unaccustomed rates of action by the presence of a competitor? Much as JonR above, I feel that just LH and RH comparable to their present medium - or better still large - radius points are likely to best advertise the benefits. And are they going to stick with the constant crossing angle wangle, or attempt something rather closer to prototype?

Atlantic 3279 wrote:... I wonder if they have even taken the "father of the bride" speech at their daughter's wedding as an open invitation to drone on about technical details of full-size continuously welded flat-bottom rail, heavy concrete sleepers, deep ballasting and Hooke's Law?

I'd prefer that to the one I went to where the FotB was an unreconstructed Something-ist, and gave us the benefit of Marxo-whatsit dialectic on the oppressive institution of marriage. But then I spent much of my career around specialists who couldn't tell you the time, without first explaining the principles of timekeeping mechanisms from the clepsydra onwards; so have a fair tolerance for this kind of stuff.

Life is too short; that particular thread I read as a sort of warning of what happens when you take things just that little bit too seriously.

I'm reserving passing judgement on the track until I have a piece of it in my hands to play with; I really couldn't care about how many bolts there are to each chair or which way the chocks are facing. I just hope either Peco or DCC hurry up with the pointwork!

I certainly agree that pointwork is the vital element in this matter - we could actually make do very easily without any new plain track since the SMP and C&L options already cover that. From my own point of view the most helpful start on any range of points would be general equivalents of the current medium and large radius, R & L. It doesn't bother me whether or not the fixed crossing angle persists, but my stipulation for a "medium" point would be that the minimum nominal radius must not drop below 3 feet, and the "must adhere to real track geometry" pedants claim that a "proper" point cannot satisfy that requirement. Having built perfectly workable and in my view "reasonable looking" points that are as compact as the medium Peco ones, which don't have a tighter radius than 3ft, and which do achieve the necessary exit angle between the two tracks, I don't care whether any new Peco products have "real track geometry" in that respect. I just want to be able, with minimal fuss, to use medium ones as substitutes for existing medium ones or for my hand-built 3ft radius items. Minor trimming of plain track ends or tweaking of alignment to accommodate the new points might be tolerable in some places, but where existing points are shoe-horned in to complex formations I don't want to have to rip the whole lot out and re-design because the new stuff isn't compact enough to fit.

In the end of course, we'll get what Peco think best, and with any luck it will be good enough for us to be grateful for it.

Most subjects, models and techniques covered in this thread are now listed in various categories on page1

Dec. 2018: Almost all images that disappeared from my own thread following loss of free remote hosting are now restored.

I simply do not understand people who spend their entire lives telling everyone who will listen what good modellers they are (but shows us nothing in the way of actual modelling by way of return) to the extent that it's almost "how dare Peco make turnouts that everyone can use" (!!!)

Good post there Graeme but I fear the extremes of modellers make it increasingly difficult for anything reasonable to be heard or observed these days.